Packt Publishing were kind enough to send me a review copy of OpenAM, and a very professional job it is. While I've not had a chance to read it in detail, what I have read so far has been excellent - Indira writes clearly, covering every aspect of OpenAM, from the basics of single sign-on to advanced topics such as integrating OpenAM with Google Apps and salesforce.com (yay!) and interacting with OpenAM via its RESTful identity web service interface.

I'll post a more thorough review once I'm done reading, suffice to say for now, if you're working with or evaluating OpenSSO/OpenAM, this should definitely be on your bookshelf! Click here to go to Packt's page for OpenAM.

My friends at ForgeRock are bringing their series of OpenSSO user group meetings to the USA and Canada in late March/early April 2010. If you're interested in where they're taking open source identity, you should definitely take this opportunity to participate in one of the meetings - choose from New York (3/29), Toronto (3/30), Chicago (3/31) or San Francisco (4/1). I'll likely take the drive up 280 to the SF event on April 1st - see you there!

Although I'm no longer as active in the OpenSSO community as I once was, some things still catch my eye - for example, news of a series of user group meetings across Northern Europe in late November and early December. OpenSSO experts Allan Foster, Jonathan Scudder, Steve Ferris and Victor Ake (not a blogger amongst them!?!?) will be presenting on OpenSSO-related topics ranging from monitoring to the Fedlet, via entitlements and OAuth, in Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, London and Brussels. Seems like SupportRock might be a name to watch in the world of OpenSSO...

It's been a while since Build 4 of OpenSSO, as we work towards an early access (EA) build of Sun Federated Access Manager 8.0, OpenSSO's commercial 'twin'. Our plan designates OpenSSO build 5 as the FAM 8.0 EA, but we still have some minor issues to iron out before we're ready for EA, hence the release of OpenSSO 1.0 Build 4.5.

The more I work on OpenSSO, the more I realize the nuances of open source development. The fact that we released this 'interim' stable build between builds 4 and 5 is one example of this - the demand for build 4.5 has come from the OpenSSO community, which is now MUCH larger than the FAM team within Sun.